Missing Conversation

I miss the conversational nature of Twitter. Perhaps it is because I don’t check it as often, or I need to curate my lists better, but I feel like there is an increase in the amount of noise there. Twitter is becoming more and more a place to syndicate your Instagram, Medium posts, and everything else, rather than fun conversation. Yes, I realize you are probably reading this from a link on Twitter or Facebook. (gRegor, you hypocrite.)

Of course, I’m not contributing much to the conversation on Twitter lately, either. I have been feeling pretty stressed, so that causes me to tweet less often. I don’t want to just tweet about how stressed I’m feeling, though. Ain’t nobody got time for that. One of the ways I decompress after work stress is working on my site or other indieweb projects. It feels nice to work on something I am much more in control of; I don’t have to answer to others or work on complex data problems. After putting that work in, I need to, well, actually write something. So that brings us to today.

I have half-joked about setting up a feed reader since Google Reader disappeared. The social aspects of it were quite fun at the time. I wonder if that era has passed now that we have so many more social-whatever things vying for our attention, but I am still tempted to try. I recently found a software library for reading RSS/Atom feeds and have been working on adding microformats support to it. Once I get that working, I am going to try setting up a feed reader and explore some of the social aspects Google Reader had. I don’t intend for this to be a big thing open to the public, but I will start with a small group of people and see how it goes. I will share the code, too, so if others are interested they can run their own copy.

If you’re interested, or just like to answer survey questions:

1) What feed readers have you used in the past?

2) Do you use any feed readers currently? If yes, which ones?

3) What are some of the most important features of a feed reader to you?

4) What are you least satisfied with about your feed reader (or feed readers in general)?